Good morning! Today we have for you:
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A sublime tinga de pollo for many delicious meals
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A vegetarian stuffed pepper recipe that’s actually easy
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And, a recipe for tomatoes and eggplants for when you buy too many of both
Greetings, people who eat food! Your ex-restaurant critic here, forgotten but not gone. Because the New York Times Cooking show must go on, I’m filling in for Sam today. They’ve never asked me to do this before. I expect that, by the time we reach the end of this newsletter, the reasons for that will be painfully clear to everyone.
During the 12 years that I reviewed restaurants, I rarely ate at home, and I cooked practically nothing, unless toasting an English muffin counts. I am, in other words, almost completely unqualified to talk about the ways in which heat can be applied to raw ingredients. This doesn’t stop me, however, from having strong opinions about all kinds of cooking issues.
Tinga de pollo, for instance. I am convinced that life gets better once you know how to make tinga. If someone had pressed a recipe for shreds of chicken in chipotles and tomatoes into my hand the day I moved from a college dorm into a house with an actual kitchen, I might not have spent so much of my 20s being confused about what to eat next.
The supreme virtue of tinga is that you can do so many things with it. As the note above this recipe adapted by Tejal Rao from Guadalupe Moreno of Mi Morena in San Francisco says, it works in tacos, tostadas, quesadillas and tamales. I would add that you can also stack it into a torta with sliced avocado and a smudge of black beans. Or build empanadas around it. If you add some of the broth you poached the chicken in to make the tinga a little wet and sloshy, you’ve got a stew that you can eat over rice, or with warm tortillas, or both.
Now that I’m in restaurant detox, tinga appeals to me, largely because it is the opposite of anything you’d see on a tasting menu. It belongs to taqueros, tamaleros and confident home cooks, a class that I am desperate to join.
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The post A (Former) Critic’s Summer Cooking Notebook appeared first on New York Times.
